It is with great pride that the Central Committee of the People’s Liberation Front offers this first edition of the collective notes and teachings of our esteemed Chairman, Comrade Rwys Barna, to which we have penned as ‘The Red Book.’ Without doubt, we believe that this is the most towering theoretical work to emerge from the current revolutionary struggle in Karthus.

The last few years have witnessed the swift transformation of the military arena of the imperialist powers of Karthus. On the one side, the ruling nobility and the ruling royalist class, in response to sharpening social contradictions in the Northern Regions, have banished any pretense of democratic rule and foisted direct royal control on the restive masses in the form of strict military dictatorship. On the other side, a revolutionary people’s movement has rapidly and steadily grown in strength, so that today, at the very height of the Karthusian people’s oppression by royalist oppression, they, the peasantry and the oppressed races, are also closer to liberation than any other movement in Selyria as a whole.

The Red Book was written in a period of deepening crisis of the system of bourgeois-royalist political control. It in fact warned that sooner or later—the ruling class would be forced to shift its class dictatorship from the parliamentary, formal democratic form to the openly repressive, absolutist type, which we currently see today. Armed with these and other path-breaking theoretical insights, PLF cadres have been able to rapidly fan out to three regions in the country, covering especially the provinces of Certia, Illous, and the key region of Geromme, where the PLF and the fraternal Kofarago clan of the outer border have forced the reactionary royalist army to divide its forces in a debilitating two-front war.

The Central Committee of the PLF offers this book as a starting point for every revolutionary patriot of any race or class to make further analysis and investigation as the basis for concrete and sustained revolutionary action.

NOTE: The Kofarago clan intensified border clashes with Karthus following the military rule placed by the Karthusian Town Watch in Southern Geromme, which later triggered a casus-belli for the Great Orc War.

Society changes mainly because of conflicts within it, such as conflicts between how things are made and how people relate to each other, conflicts between different groups of people, and conflicts between old and new ideas. These conflicts drive society forward and provide the push for replacing the old society with a new one.

Prof. Rwysveldi Barna, Lecture on the Contradictions of Society

1573, Alaris Lecture Hall, Socioeconomics

Karthus is a nation situated in the eastern part of Selyria, between Trost and Ulfenheim in the north, Hreinngar and Ravena to its east, and Porthos and the Orcish clans to its south. It is a territory with a rich flat landscape, including forests, rivers, and coastal areas along the Draconic Sea. It experiences a temperate climate with cold winters and mild summers. Karthus is mainly populated by the Human race, although it sustains a minority of Goblinoids, Elves, Dwarves, Ashannis, and Orcs.

The geographic position of Karthus makes the Karthusian folk suspect to advancing feudalism amongst the courts of the human Kingdoms, it also enriches the revolutionary history of the Karthusian folk - with a rich background of peasant struggle and minority movements in the Kingdom creating the basis for the birth of Selyrian revolutionary culture.

It has vast forest, mineral, marine and magical resources. Its forests cover a little over one-third of the land. Its mineral resources include iron, gold, copper, nickel, and so many others. Its principal Eubenite river can be controlled to irrigate fields continuously and also to provide rich fertile water to every part of the country. It has rich inland and sea fishing grounds. Numerous fine harbors and landlocked straits are available for building up the maritime industry.

Karthus maintains itself as the center of national learning, as the head of the intellectual movement in Selyria, many peoples across the continent and others head to Karthus to receive principal university education, developing skills in the arcane arts and in the studies of philosophies.

As predetermined by the fervent national development present in Karthusian society, it stands as the philosophical and arcane center of Selyrian education. As a result, it has been subject to the historical contradictions that built Karthus into the present nation it is today.

Before the unification of the two Druid clans, the people of Karthus had already attained a semi-communal and semi-slave social system in many parts and also a proto-feudal system in certain parts, especially in the general dominion where the current city of Vendeaux stands today, where such a feudal faith as Reedianism had already taken roots.

Note from the SUV: Contemporary evidence does not align with the idea that The High Priestess had ever visited Karthus, let alone Vendeaux. Our findings have shown however, that Karthus, before the occupation of the empires during the Centurion Wars, was a land filled with Shifter, Elf, and Human natives separated into different Druid clans.

In Western Karthus, the arrival of Elvish clans from the migration to Valenti allowed for the creation of a rich forest commerce ranging from the Ravenian highlands to the settlements of Valenti and vice-versa. Traders from the Elvish settlements vied for commerce with the pre-feudal inhabitants of the archipelago. Even during the turn of the 9th century, where Valenti had been, for the most part, under Porthosian rule, the region was an important trading emporium for inter-species trade between humans, elves, and shifters.

The absence of a political unity involving all or the majority of the people of Karthus allowed the Reedianite feudalists in central Karthus to impose their will on the people step by step. The Reedianite Porthosians employed the standard tactic of divide-and-rule when in 169 FS, they sided with the human merchants against the Elvish settlers of Valenti. They started a pattern of inveigling certain clans to adopt the Reedianite faith and then employing them against other clans which resisted feudalistic domination. However, by then, the centralized Karthusian druids copied this tactic, the difference being that it was their own people they were doing this to - the Certhians.

The most outstanding revolts in the first century of royal rule were those led by Gwyneved Tyrwin in Valenti during 739, the Allaris peasant uprising in 801-823 and by Adivos Karumagi in 842 in his clan village of present day Kitsumachi. At the beginning of the 10th century, the Orcs in the southern highlands of South Geromme expedited against attempts to colonize them and used the favorable terrain of their homeland to maintain their independence.

Note: Adivos Kuramagi initially joined The Dukedom of Karthus peacefully in 831, but later revolted due to plans to heavily urbanize the region from a fishing community to a noble-controlled port city.

By the beginning of the 12th century, under the strain of increasing exploitation, and the Hreinngarian colonial politicking of House Magrin, the national and democratic aspirations of the broad masses of the people rose. As oppression was stepped up, the spirit of resistance among the ruled, especially the peasant masses, became heightened under the relatively peaceful Karthus Red March (which the liberals call 'The Second Karthus March' to appeal to the bourgeois nobles), led by the revolutionary bourgeois elements of the new universities and their educated intelligentsia. The Karthus Red March was a collective of mass revolts and uprisings brought about by the rise of liberalism and the educational progressive movement from the state universities, leading to military defections and infighting within the state apparatus. This led to the first parliaments formed in Karthus, thus creating the current governmental system, and the constitution of the kingdom.

The Karthus Red March is the collective name of a series of both violent and peaceful revolts against the rule of the absolute monarchy, initially started by student protests in the SUV.  A democratic form of government can be seen in some areas of Karthus, such as the Territory of Illou.

There was however no ideological and political preparation against the return of Royalist imperialism and the reimposition of feudalism in the countryside. Consistently acting as the an instrument of Royalist imperialism within the parliament, the bourgeois reactionary gang of the conservative elements of the noble order harped on loyalty to the Karthusian Royal Family and its armies and hoped to engage in parliamentary struggle under the dispensation of these monsters. Yet, familial imperialism and the local exploiting classes - being the nobility and those aligned to the royal family, were determined to attack the people, their political leadership and the people with real swords as well as with sugar-coated ones.

Towards the turn of the 13th century, the funds derived by the now puppet Council from damage and rehabilitation payments, relief goods, sale of surplus materials, expenditures of Karthusian military personnel, and veterans’ payments from the Karthus March and its uprisings, were already being exhausted by the unrestricted importation of consumption and luxury goods, by public works, by the reconstruction of agricultural mills, offices and palaces of the comprador-nobility and by rampant graft and corruption from the Royal Family and its conservative elements. Import controls had to be imposed in 1299 to conserve the gold reserves of the reactionary government. In 1501, an entire system of foreign exchange controls was applied to further put a brake on the depletion of the financial resources of the puppet government.

Veterans payments for soldiers, who revolted against the monarchy during the period of the Karthus March, were transferred to public development by the Liberals to reconstruct areas hit by revolt.

Gold reserve import tariffs were introduced as a result of the massive flow of gold from Ravena, Ulfenheim, and Hreinngar.

An insidious propaganda drive supporting the perpetuation of the interests of the Karthusian nobility has been unleashed by the liberal ex-revolutionaries, especially by the revisionists through the University Belt political ‘progressive’ gang. Brandishing their slogans of “peaceful revolution,” “constitutional reform” and “profit-sharing,” several reformist groups spread the mendacious lie that the restoration of the economy could be advanced through legislation and through the advancement of the interregional market. The peasants are told that they can become landowners and can participate in joint ventures with the nobility by going to the land owners to buy their own land and become land-owners themselves. This led to the sham hamlet system, where rich peasants, with the connections to the nobility and sleight-of-hand, could trick other peasants to work for them in order to get richer, thus leading to a pyramid of corruption and deception.

As of 1310, despite conspicuous attempts before to expand it, large-scale cultivation of export crops prevailed over about 28 percent of the total agricultural land. Land devoted to food crops comprised about 72 per cent. Feudalist methods of exploitation are strikingly evident in lands where export crops are cultivated, except in some few areas where Hreinngarian trained Sanamancers have been introduced by the landlords.

The land development reform came with the 20 year plan by the then-ruling Liberal government in the Allaris Council.

In the period of direct and indirect imperialist rule, there has been a long list of sham land reform measures. These include laws involving land titles, disposition of public lands, resettlement, “expropriation” of large estates, “fair” crop distribution credit and “anti-usury” and “just wage” for peasant workers.

A series of public land laws was passed in 1411, 1419 and 1429 under the pretext of encouraging the dispossessed peasantry to acquire public lands through homestead, purchase or lease of limited areas. The call for resettlement in so-called ‘frontier areas’ was actually the fig-leaf for the large-scale acquisition of Elvish and Orcish lands by Karthusian nobility, farmstead owners, landlords and bureaucrats. The dispossessed peasants were attracted to these areas so as to provide labor for clearing the land and to serve as the buffer between the dispossessed local inhabitants, usually the shifters, who usually belonged to non-Human nationalities on one hand and the imperialists and landlords on the other.

Our stance is simple – whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialists and feudalists is a counterrevolutionary. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in words only but act otherwise is a revolutionary in speech. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense.

Prof. Rwysveldi Barna, Speech to the Central Command

1560, Barna Family Manor, Valenti

Note: The Barna Manor was used as a safehouse for the central command when forced to organize in the cities. It was then moved to Mt. Charon in in The Ogroid Highlands near the border with Sicarius until the surrender.

The intensification of reformist and liberal activity is complementary to the intensification of imperialist activity. The diehard reactionaries, such as with The Selyrian Crimson Militia , will never cease to employ reformist tricks even while they commit heinous counterrevolutionary deeds. They will go to the extent of consorting with the lying liberal. Reformism and Contemporary Liberalism are the brittle shields of Imperialism.

It is an absolutely foolish hope that legal possibilities can be exhausted before waging an armed revolution. There can be no end to law-making and parliamentary hocus-pocus if the reactionaries are not opposed by an armed revolution. They can even rewrite their constitution but merely to put more embellishments on it. At this critical stage of Karthus’s history, the reactionaries find it convenient to rig up another Constitutional Convention and float talks of “peaceful revolution.”